---
title: "\"Mind your p's and q's\" — paper by Piton and Pignot (2010)"
description: "Piton and Pignot study how the apostrophe behaved in 17th-century English and how to handle it when modernising such texts… 18 references."
authors: ["Odile Piton", "Helene Pignot"]
year: 2010
venue: "arXiv:1002.0479"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0479"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.1002.0479"
arxiv: "1002.0479"
licence: "arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute"
licence_url: "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/piton-2010-mind-p-s-q-s/"
---
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# "Mind your p's and q's": or the peregrinations of an apostrophe in 17th Century English

**Authors:** [Odile Piton](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/odile-piton/) and [Helene Pignot](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/helene-pignot/) · **Year:** 2010 · **Venue:** arXiv:1002.0479 · **Licence:** [arXiv — non-exclusive license to distribute](http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0479) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.0479) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.1002.0479](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1002.0479) · [arXiv 1002.0479](https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0479) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2999048516)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Piton and Pignot study how the apostrophe behaved in 17th-century English and how to handle it when modernising such texts automatically. They begin with a short history. The mark spread from Aldus Manutius's 1501 Italian printing to French typographers such as Geofroy Tory, then reached English print by 1559. They also note today's confusion over the apostrophe and the existence of several competing character encodings for it. Their data is a small hand-typed corpus of travel narratives about Greece and Anatolia by six authors, taken from EEBO page images. They built morphological and syntactic graphs in NooJ, plus dictionaries, to recognise each apostrophe use and map it to modern spelling. In the corpus, the mark mostly signals dropped letters, as in past-tense ’d, tho’ and ’tis, and sometimes a plural. The possessive ’s is still uncommon, and many genitives appear with no apostrophe at all. The authors say their tools cover every apostrophe in the corpus with little noise. They hope the resources will make early modern English easier for learners of English as a second language.

## Key points
- The corpus draws on six writers active between 1636 and 1693: Thomas Smith, George Wheler, John Ray, George Sandys, Paul Rycaut and Henry Blount. It totals 44,383 tokens and contains 158 apostrophes, 113 of them in Smith alone.
- Of 54 instances of ’s, 39 are genitives and 15 mark plurals. A further 91 are ’d or ’t forms, and 13 are other contractions such as tho’, thro’, ’tis and th’.
- Around ninety transformation graphs handle spelling variants, for example chaining imbrac’d → embrac’d → embraced. Each candidate output still needs human validation.
- Graphs are ranked by priority, and a lower-priority graph is skipped once a higher one succeeds. Running all graphs together produced floods of wrong analyses. Setting priorities for the syntactic graphs remains unsolved.
- Apostrophe-like characters arrive under several codes, including 39 and U+2018/U+2019, which can make searches miss matches. Because NooJ treats the apostrophe as a delimiter, contracted verbs get split into two tokens.

## Interesting ideas
- Treat apostrophe repair as separate operations: deleting a plural-marking apostrophe, inserting a missing genitive one (mans → man’s), and rejoining verbs split by the mark. Each has a different difficulty and needs its own logic.
- Apply morphological rewrite rules as a priority cascade that stops at the first success. Firing every rule at once floods the analysis with false candidates.
- Do not guess a lemma for a fragment left over from a split contraction. Mark it UNKNOWN and let a later syntactic pass reattach it.
- Store short, unambiguous function-word variants (tho’, thro’, ’twixt) directly in the dictionary, and reserve rule machinery for open-class nouns and verbs.
- Fold all apostrophe-like code points into one form before matching. Otherwise identical words split across encodings and searches silently lose results.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tokens): The tokenizer could label every apostrophe with its role (genitive, elision, plural) before tagging, so downstream lemmas and UD features come from an explicit decision.
- **I2** (tokens): Unknown-word handling for archaic or noisy spellings could try rules in ranked order and record which rule fired, which keeps the lemma choice explainable.
- **I3** (tree): Fragments from contractions could enter parsing with an explicit "unresolved" flag, and a repair step could merge them once the surrounding syntax is clear.
- **I4** (tokens): A small lexicon of archaic or contracted closed-class forms in crate en would cheaply cover fable and old-text inputs without new parsing rules.
- **I5** (tokens): Normalising U+0027, U+2018 and U+2019 up front, while keeping the original character for generation, would stop contractions from fragmenting in lexicon lookups.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 9,296 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 1,373 works

## Cite

Cite as: Odile Piton and Helene Pignot. 2010. "Mind your p's and q's": or the peregrinations of an apostrophe in 17th Century English. arXiv:1002.0479.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{piton2010mind,
  title = {{"Mind your p's and q's": or the peregrinations of an apostrophe in 17th Century English}},
  author = {Odile Piton and Helene Pignot},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.1002.0479},
  eprint = {1002.0479},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1002.0479}
}
```

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## References

18 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 24 October 2026*